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Charles Marie Bonaventure du Breil, Marquis de
Rays (2 January 1832 – 29 July 1893) was a French nobleman who had ambitions
of starting a great French colony in the South Pacific.[1] He
led four European expeditions[2] to
establish colonies in a place he called New France which is the
island now referred to as New Ireland in the Bismark Archipelago of present day Papua New
Guinea.

Charles was born on the family estate Quimerc'h in Brittany, the son of Charles
du Breil and Mari Prevost. As a child in 1838 he succeeded his
father as marquis and spent his youth in fortune-seeking but
ineffective adventures abroad: in the United States, Senegal, Madagascar, and Indo-China. He
eventually returned to France, where, on 22 September 1869, he
married Emilie Labat, who gave him five children, including one
known son: Eugène Paul Emile.

Example of the marquis's self-promotion

It was the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War and the
readings he made of some navigators' journals that prompted de Rays
to embark on further adventures for the glorification of France and
the Roman Catholic Church. The theatre for his
ambitions was to be the South Pacific, where in 1877 he was
self-proclaimed "Charles, King of New France" (La Nouvelle
France), an imaginary Oceanic empire covering territories as
yet unclaimed by any European powers. Through advertisements, word
of mouth, and a journal of his own publishing, Nouvelle
France, de Rays brought to public attention his plans for
converting and then colonising the South Pacific, which he claimed
abounded in fertile soil. Specifically, de Rays planned to start a
colony, "Colonie Libre de Port Breton", at Port Praslin.[3] His
ideas were universally rejected by governments, but enough people
believed his wild predictions to support an expedition.

The third of his expeditions, often referred to simply as the de Rays
Expedition, in 1880 is most famous for its absolute failure.
Aboard the ships Chandernagore, Gentil,
Nouvelle Bretagne, and India, a motley group of
570 ill-prepared colonists, in the main French, German, and Italian, arrived at Port Breton. The
marquis is widely believed to have deliberately misled the
colonists, distributing literature claiming a bustling settlement
that did not exist, near present day Kavieng, which had numerous public buildings,
wide roads, and rich, arable land.[4]
This port was further purported to be capital of a great empire,
his "Kingdom of New France". In fact, the site was an extremely
poor choice: supplies were difficult to get through and malaria was
unavoidable. The high death rate convinced most colonists to soon
flee to Australia, New Caledonia, and
the Philippines.

De Rays himself did not visit his colony and was arrested for
fraud in Spain in July 1882. He
was extradited to France and sentenced to six years in prison for
criminal
negligence, but his career as an adventurer was not over. He
died in a French asylum near Rosporden after accruing several more
failures to his name.[5]